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Hugh Pickens writes "Businessweek reports that Adobe has taken out newspaper advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times today and posted an open letter to call out the tablet-computer maker for stifling competition. 'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,' the letter states. 'No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.' The letter is part of a widening rift between Apple and Adobe. Two weeks ago, Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs wrote a 29-paragraph public missive panning Adobe's Flash as having 'major technical drawbacks.' US antitrust enforcers also may investigate Apple following a complaint from Adobe, people familiar with the matter said this month. Adobe has also launched a banner ad campaign to let you know that they love Apple. The two-piece banner ads are composed of a 720x90-pixel 'We [heart] Apple' design, followed by a 300x250-pixel medium rectangle that reads: 'What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.'"

But they still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to rewrite their products (Flash isnt their only product) to stop using APIs from two deprecations ago. They apparently love Microsoft even more than Apple.

WHAT?! Tons of people complain about that. It's a fucking cell phone, it should be able to run J2ME apps, and the fact that it can't is solely due to Apple's need to make sure they get paid for every app their stupid devices can run.

Look, I don't care if Apple decides not to include Flash by default. Fine, whatever.

The fact that you can't CHOOSE to install Flash and you can't CHOOSE to use another, more powerful browser, on the other hand - that I care about. THAT'S an asshole, anti-competitive move. Apple deserves to be smacked down for that.

Imagine if, along with bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY app to be approved by Microsoft before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.

It's a fucking computer. I should be able to use whatever language I want and whatever libraries I want to target it. As long as something can create code that the computer can run, who the fuck is Apple to say whether or not I'm allowed to write software using it?!

I recently read your open letter to Apple and let me just say that I cannot agree more. I particularly liked this bit:

"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company -- no matter how big or how creative -- should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web."

Since my platform of choice is [64 bit Linux, Solaris, Irix, HPUX, any of the Various BSDs...] I cannot wait for your forthcoming (very soon I expect) release of Flash for this platform! I realize that my platform of choice is not the most popular one out there, but your message gives me hope! Given your support of openness, and in full understanding that my platform is rather obscure, perhaps you could simply release most of the slient code as open source and allow me to port it myself. That would be even better.

I don't think this is the type of freedom our founding father's had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights. I think the type of freedom they had in mind would be Apple having the freedom to not support Flash on their device and consumers having the freedom to not buy an Apple product if this design decision is not to their liking. It's not like Apple is locking out Adobe to push their own proprietary standard, there is no anti-trust issue here.

Adobe is the next Sun. They're going to keep faltering and faltering until they're bought out by some giant. Open source and open standards are going to kill them. Eventually Gimp will work well enough to replace Photoshop, Flash will be dead, an open source WYSIWYG will replace InDesign/Dreamweaver, and this trend will continue with all their products. I think the folks at Adobe realize the impact that open source will have. They know that keeping the web running on Flash is their only hope to survive as a company.

Adobe is like if Microsoft only had Office and IE. Look at what OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, and Google Docs are doing. Software as a product is a failing business model, software as a service is the future. IBM and Google know this, that's why they're so ahead of the curve.

So get up offa that keyboard, come open the door and let me in. And go make me a sandwich while I use your computer to develop in Flash. You have Mountain Dew and Cheetos, right? No? You bastard! Stop infringing on my freedom to eat and drink what I want and go get me some!

This argument is stupid and probably comes from people who have never actually built a product the size of Adobe's products. You think they should just bow down and use whatever new flavor of APIs apple wants them too? Including sever costs to them in rewriting large portions of an application that heavily uses carbon considering it's mostly a visual app.
Sorry but, at least Microsoft understands that backwards compatibility is a requirement for those corporations to be able to create those kinds of products. I'm a Linux user but I can admit that lack of stable APIs have affected the development of things like device drivers for Linux.

Android is now a bigger market to shoot for anyway.
Android is a bigger market, I suppose, but which Android is the bigger market within the bigger market? Fragmentation of the versions and the not so backwards / forwards compatibility is making it hard to target.

This is a battle between purveyors of closed devices that exert outrageous amounts of control over what users can do with their devices, and purveyors of bug riddled crash prone propretary garbage who are misusing the word "open" as cover for a self-serving argument.

Pfft! My COBOL.Net based app for the iPad contraption will pwn your feeble efforts! I have my COBOL to Ada to Lisp to LabView to FORTRAN to VHDL to C to Objective C/Cocoa workflow all ready to start chugging away. Throw the switch, Igor!

1)To prevent horrible, battery-sucking shovelware from showing up on the iPhone/iPad. Those Flash games at newgrounds, for example, were never meant for touchscreens. Apple does not want its users having unsatisfactory experiences playing their Flash games, and then subsequently blaming Apple for the bad UI.

2)To prevent developers from cross-developing for Android, Pre, Blackberry etc at the same time. You want to develop for iPhone? You have to use Apple-approved tools only. Thus, developers are less likely to offer the same apps for competing platforms.

You can debate the morality of what Apple is doing (personally, I think it sucks) but the reasons are pretty clear.

It would be just as buggy and crash-prone [zdnet.com] as it is right now on the Mac... Because it's on every darn page on the web - for adverts - it'd be running almost constantly as the user uses Safari; so the other down-side comes into play - it's a huge battery hog.

Granted, yes, Flash sucks. As a user, I'm not sure I'd install it.

But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?

Forget the browser for a moment, though. They're banning it and all other third-party frameworks in an effort to prevent cross-platform applications, even if they compile to Objective-C, which is downright evil. More evil than anything Microsoft ever did. To claim that this has anything to do with battery life or crashing is moronic -- Apple already presumably checks things like this before they approve apps, right? And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away. In either case, it seems downright fascist to ban a tool because it might make the experience suck, instead of evaluating the resulting app and see if it does make the experience suck.

Now, I agree that this is good for Apple, in the short term. It's also good for the Web, in the short term, because it forces people to start using HTML5. But in the long term, I think it will come back to bite them, and in any case, don't pretend it's a good thing for either iPhone/Pad developers or users.

I was so pleased to hear your stance on our right to view and create content regardless of platform or channel. When can we expect the Adobe Creative Suite for operating systems other than Windows & OS X?

According to that article, Android, on all devices, is barely beating out iPhone OS on one device. iPhone OS is sold on three distinct devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad), of which the latter two were not included in the numbers. Android has a long way to go.

To prevent horrible, battery-sucking shovelware from showing up on the iPhone/iPad.

You never looked in the AppStore right? For every decent app there are at least 500 garbage apps out there.

Apple does not want its users having unsatisfactory experiences playing their Flash games, and then subsequently blaming Apple for the bad UI.

Because iTunes for Windows and the plethora of crapware in AppStore is such an amazing user experience?

You can debate the morality of what Apple is doing (personally, I think it sucks) but the reasons are pretty clear

Apple is lying why they don't want to allow cross compilers. The reason is simple: lock in users to maintain the very high profit margins on iDevices. Nothing to do with quality of cross compiled and/or flash apps nor user experience.

Imagine if, along with bundling Opera with the Wii, Nintendo FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY game to be approved by Nintendo before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.

Funny how nobody complains about game consoles, network appliances, or any other propriety electronic device being a closed platform. It's only evil if Apple does it?

This is insightful? What's the insight? Do you know anything about HTML5? Apple is helping build an open web that proprietary devices from any company can connect to. How is an open standard such as HTML an Apple only web experience? The reality is exactly the opposite. Right now we have a situation where one company, Adobe, determines what web experience (if you're talking about Flash) you get on any given device or platform. Compare that to an open HTML5 rendering engine (webkit), and a push towards open web standards. In what universe does that add up to that being an Apple only experience?

Forget the browser for a moment, though. They're banning it and all other third-party frameworks in an effort to prevent cross-platform applications, even if they compile to Objective-C, which is downright evil. More evil than anything Microsoft ever did.

Microsoft didn't allow indie games at all on the original Xbox console. Is that evil?

But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?

I'm sure they considered that. But take it a bit further... Jane Public enables flash to watch the 'OMG ponies' video-of-the-day. Are you confident that every single user would then think "Oh, now I have to turn Flash back off, otherwise my phone will now suck". I'm not. And then a little while down the road it's not "I take the personal responsibility for making my phone suck because I turned on Flash", it's more like "the iPhone sucks. Apple sucks".

Tell me again how this benefits Apple ?

And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Translating Flash to ObjC and then compiling it doesn't remove any of the bad algorithmic design in Flash unless they rewrite Flash itself. I once wrote a Java->C++ converter which worked pretty well for me until gcj came along. If you wrote bad Java code (say: busy wait on events) you'd get bad C++ code out the other end - there's nothing magical about translating to ObjC that fixes bad code.

Adobe tried to make an end-run around Apple's "we don't want your crappy Flash environment because it sucks" position, by implementing a Flash->C (or ObjC, whatever) translator. Apple either had to capitulate at that point, and accept all of the problems with Flash on their devices, or they could prevent it. If Adobe has a Flash->C translator, I can't see any real way Apple could prevent Flash without doing what they did.

I'd say that if Adobe had done the right thing, and made Flash better (efficient, stable), and ported *that* to Android instead of putting effort into trying to work around Apple's position on Flash, they'd have made a *far* better case for Apple eating humble pie and asking Adobe to implement this mythical excellent Flash environment for the iPhone. But they didn't.
br
Simon

So....what you are saying here is that you don't want native applications anymore. Instead of native Windows apps and native Mac apps and native Linux apps you would rather just have everything be made in Adobe AIR?
Thank fucking god you aren't the one making decisions that matter....

Whats a hpux? There does have to be a lower limit of users before they'll bother adding support.

And that is exactly the problem. Adobe controls who can use a full featured, up-to-date flash viewer, thereby controlling who sees the "full web".

Anyone in the world can go and read the HTML 5 spec and implement a viewer (before it is even finalized!). new versions of flash spec aren't released until long after they're finalized and adobe has made everyone update to their new viewer.

Apple is only trying to "stop" you when you use their devices. They aren't trying to stop me if I'm using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS (or even on OS X).

This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that. If diesel usurps gasoline as the standard fuel of choice, maybe it's because it's better.

LOL I can't stand Apple personally. But Flash? Adobe has destroyed something that was once a very cool thing. And they did it with shitty code and a development philosophy that completely ignored security concerns and opened one more door for attackers to use that requires no retardation ont he user's part.

All that's required is an adserver that doesn't do a very good job of screening ads that serves ads to a lot of sites and viola.

Because having a bunch of Blackberry apps doesn't serve to tie you to the Blackberry platform, or having a bunch of Android apps doesn't tie you to the Android platform. Hell, I've even heard a bunch of bitching from people on here about how Windows Phone 7 is breaking backwards compatibility, and so all the apps they've bought are worthless.

No kidding! That and show that you can make flash run on mobile platforms you do have access like android phones. How many times now has the android flash rollout been pushed back? 3? 4?! And Adobe is complaining they can't use it on the iPhone?!
I suspect half the issue with flash is the lack of developer skill, that many develop in a way that makes it work but don't debug and slim their code when they are done (ease of development makes for ease of cutting corners and lack of good code I suppose). Call me a fan boi (trust me I'm not, even as a mac user, I am a large critic of apple in recent years), but I side with Apple on this. Show us Flash working well on other mobile devices before you complain.

... If that statement were applied to your desktop you'd be seeing red and you know it. Let's change it a little:
"Microsoft is only trying to 'stop' you when you use their OS. They aren't trying to stop you from using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS"...
If the above were the case instead of "limited" device like an ipad or iphone, far more people would have an issue with it.

That's what I love about Apple fanboys. When Apple ultimately removes some feature or functionality, the fanboys simply convince themselves they never needed it to begin with. When applications for doing a specific are removed from the App store, fanboys will happily use only Apple's authorized specific task app. When websites fail to work for containing Flash, fanboys will happily flock to Apple-friendly websites and pretend that the content on the other websites weren't worth viewing anyways. And when a mac eventually de-evolves into a webcam with a wi-fi connection, fanboys will loyally claim that this and only this was what they were looking for in a computer .

Last time this happened, when they dropped Adobe Premiere, Apple bought Final Cut Pro and turned it into a good replacement with version 3 vs Premiere 6 and with Final Cut Pro 4 blew Premiere out of the water for a good number of years. Even though Premiere is back on Mac, I don't know anyone in the industry that uses it on Mac. They all still use FCP.

My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards. What better way to spite Adobe than create free tools to replace their cash cow. Adobe already bought out and killed the only competition in professional web & graphics tools (Macromedia).

That's where you've got it wrong. The world has moved beyond the point where everything with a CPU is a computer. The iPhone is an appliance. It does all the things it was designed to do. No manufacturer is obligated to make their appliance do anything other than what they claimed it would do when they sold it to you. If you want a different appliance, feel free to vote with your wallet. If there is nothing that does what you want and you can convince some venture capitalists you're right, make a competing product. But Apple doesn't owe it to you to design appliances that work the way you wished they did.

You do realize that by far the majority of Flash content on the Web is videos and video-based ads, right? But whatever. Keep chasing Adobe's incomplete and inconsistent publication of specs on each new iteration of Flash (which usually lags by at least a year) and tie yourself to a spec that can be disappeared at any moment.

At least Microsoft had the courtesy to put OOXML in the hands of Ecma and offer the Covenant Not to Sue. With the Flash spec you don't have either of those things.

I couldn't view every page in every browser on every device before the iPhone or iPad, so how am I limited?

This isn't about freedom, it's about a market choice. People have bought the iPhone and iPad in droves and have said, more or less, that the devices are compelling enough to buy even without Flash support.

Apple doesn't have anywhere close to a monopoly in the mobile device space, so I don't understand the problem.Someone enlighten me please.

What do you think Apple's motivation is for blocking flash? They still make all their money on hardware sales. The app store only exists to encourage people to develop for their products. The only reason that makes any sense is that Apple wants a higher quality product.

The point of blocking flash is to encourage people to ONLY develop for the iPhone. Development costs generally prohibit most apps from getting cross developed for multiple platforms. Sometimes things like Flash facilitate cross-platform development. If they get developers to only create apps for the iPhone instead of cross-platform, then people have more reasons to buy the iPhone hardware as the apps they want would only exist on the iPhone.
Great business plan, horrible for consumers.

I'd say that if Adobe had done the right thing, and made Flash better (efficient, stable), and ported *that* to Android instead of putting effort into trying to work around Apple's position on Flash, they'd have made a *far* better case for Apple eating humble pie and asking Adobe to implement this mythical excellent Flash environment for the iPhone. But they didn't.br Simon

Well it's a good thing Adobe has some people who are as smart as you are then, since this is exactly what they did! Have a look at this video [youtube.com] of Flash running pretty fucking well on the N1.

I'm with you on that, I don't like Apple or their products for the most part, but I'm all for them limiting flash if they want to on their phones. I know it pisses a lot of people off but your absolutly right on with your analogy. They aren't being anti-competetive at all even though people seem to want to believe that. If I had the mod points +1 to you. People these days seem to believe that whatever they want is what should happen, they don't get that just cause they want it doesn't mean companies have to give it to you. Should they? depends on how big the market is, but they don't HAVE to.

Indeed. Here's a thought, Adobe: Instead of pissing away tens of thousands of dollars on "poor, poor, pitiful me" ads complaining about how Apple doesn't like Flash because it's buggy, crashing and bad for their devices, spend that money on some decent programmers to fix Flash so they have nothing to complain about.

I'm not sure what iPhone sales have to do with how many iPod Touches and iPads are out there, especially given that iPod Touches now outsell the iPhone [theappleblog.com]. And outselling during one quarter doesn't make a bigger market, especially when there were many more iPhones than Androids sold before that period that are still in use. Perhaps you're confusing the smartphone market with the app market? Few, if any, app devs are actually selling phones.

Explain the fact that Apple will be happy to host and serve your free app on their store and how it fits into your logic bomb here.

The fact that you can't CHOOSE to install Flash and you can't CHOOSE to use another, more powerful browser, on the other hand - that I care about. THAT'S an asshole, anti-competitive move. Apple deserves to be smacked down for that.

You can choose. It takes effort but they can't and won't stop you from jailbreaking and installing any app you want. They will stop supporting you however, which is perfectly acceptable.

Imagine if, along with bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY app to be approved by Microsoft before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.

Wow, I guess you don't know enough about windows to realize its been going that direction for a while now eh? Load an unsigned driver in Windows Vista/2008/7 without switching to test mode...

It's a fucking computer. I should be able to use whatever language I want and whatever libraries I want to target it. As long as something can create code that the computer can run, who the fuck is Apple to say whether or not I'm allowed to write software using it?!

So is my wrist watch and my old dumb nokia phone, but I can't install random apps on either of them. Fuck nokia and casio too!

What you want, is the world to fit your whim, and thats simply never going to happen regardless of how loud you scream, what temper tantrums you throw or what lame arguments you make in an attempt to get your way.

You don't always get your way, get the hell over it. Don't buy the product if it doesn't satisfy you, its that simple. Welcome to the free market. Don't like it? Tough shit, the rest of us are perfectly fine with it and the majority wins.

I'm not an Apple lover, or an Apple hater. I am a Microsoft basher, though.

But, my question is - what does Apple sell, and what does Microsoft sell, exactly?

Apple seems to sell several hardware products, along with the software necessary to operate them.

Microsoft offers nothing but software, really. Their few hardware offerings are only small parts of their overall sales, right?

To me, there is one heckuva difference. Up to a point, at least, Apple should have the right to say what is going to run on the hardware that they support with guarantees that the hardware is going to work. Only up to a point - jailbroken Apple devices were jailbroken for a reason. And, those jailbroken devices are no longer under warranty, of course.

I hate it when people compare Apple with Microsoft, trying to draw a conclusion that monopoly laws should apply to Apple for the same reasons that Microsoft was/is/will be in trouble with various courts around the world.

Maybe, just maybe, Apple is guilty of some obscure unfair competition laws, but they are NOT a monopoly, unless and until they capture significantly more than 50% of the market for telephones, or computers, or some other device. Then, we can start quibbling over finer points of law than "They have a huge market share in some specific brand/type/style of device".

It would be just as buggy and crash-prone [zdnet.com] as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.

When I looked at that video, at about the 5 minute mark they start to show how I'd be using Flash most of the time, ie: as a part of the web-page rather than just Flash on its own. To me, it didn't look as though it was running at all well. Having Flash on the web-page caused the page-update to be slow-as-molasses, and scrolling to be about 2 fps.

And this is the best they could do, under controlled circumstances, cherry-picking the sites to use ? Give me a break!

"Software as a mass-market product is a failing business model, software as a service is the future"

There, I fixed it for you. When demand for a certain type of software is very high, open source will provide a suitable replacement. For niche markets, or markets involving high liability, or strict government regulation, open source replacements are not nearly as abundant. For example, how many open-source hotel management software suites are there? How many open-source flight control systems are there?

When OS X first came out Apple said "Here's Carbon and Cocoa, Carbon will eventually be abandoned, only use it if you need to port your OS 9 application now, Cocoa is the way of the future", Adobe decided to use Carbon, then as the end of life for the Carbon API drew ever closer Adobe began crying and ranting about how "evil" Apple was for not giving them ample time to move Photoshop and their other applications to Cocoa. Hardly Apple's fault that Adobe can't be bothered actually getting started on the Cocoa version of their software until the very last moment.

Actually, the study involved smartphone market share in the US. The iPod touch and iPad are not smart phones, which explains why they weren't included.

That is indeed the reason. There was nothing wrong with the study, only the implications people are taking from it. iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices. Android developers have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.

And of course it's international sales that matter.

Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold". Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.

Thus it's wrong to say that Android sales topping iPhone sales on that study means it's a bigger market. Wrong in several different ways.

Using your argument, it would be ok if Dell or HP sold a combo hardware/software box that could only run manufacturer approved application. Selling a packaged combo, with a limited number of software options would minimize support cost and improve vendor margins. Software vendors would have to have their applications approved by Dell and could only sell their applications through Dell. And by the way, you'd need to use their approved browsers and accept whatever ads the manufacturer wanted to push at you. This model would improve PC reliability (only tested and approved applications could be run) and increase the manufacturer's revenue. Back in the old days, we called this crapware--but at least you could uninstall those applications or reinstall to OS (or the OS of your choice)..

and iphones and ipad arent fragmented?theres 3 differnet hardware versions of the iphone with a 4th coming in a few months. unless you target the lowest common denominator here it might not be fully compatible too. plus the ipad is different again as well.

Unfortunately Adobe doesn't have Apple's marketing pull. All Apple had to do to let people know their position was for Steve Jobs to post something on their website. If Adobe did the same thing, no one would really notice. They have to get the word out.

You are correct. Adobe sat on the old code for most of the decade. But they sinned in other ways against Mac OS X professionals. I am referring to CS2 and CS3 and CS4. All these software releases on the Mac platform was fleecing their die hard users. Nothing in those releases was worth the cost of upgrade from the original Creative Suite release. Meanwhile, on Windows, the Adobe products just got better and better, faster, more stable. Adobe abandoned Apple LONG before Apple abandoned Flash.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The ipad is distinctively different from the other devices. A developer probably isn't going to not make an ipad specific version because you can have a quarter size iphone version running. You also can't go the other way and have your ipad specific app run on an iphone. To me, this is fragmentation but somehow Apple gets a "pass" as usual.

No, fragmentation is what the Android platform has (And Symbian and MS Mobile too). What you describe there is called "backward compatibility" - as seen and welcomed on Windows, Macs and sometimes consoles (GameCube->Wii, PSI to PSII).

Additionally what you are missing is that app developers can indeed create and sell a single app which runs on an iPad in full screen with all the iPad widgets, and also runs on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It's called a Universal Application.

I love this. First it is sales "here" or there, and now it is international sales because there's no numbers on that.

I've no idea what you mean. It sounds like bluster. I've only ever used worldwide market share, and whenever US market share is brought up I point out it's worldwide market share that counts. ALL sales that a company makes matters, not just the ones that happen to be in America. It's even more important here because we are talking about how big a market there is for developers of software on the platforms. Developers (at least for the Apple App Store) sell their apps internationally, not just to the US.

Marketing failure. The size of a market is defined by the target market. Just because you sold more on one market doesn't necessarily mean the size of that market is limited to your sales. What you are saying is equivalent to GM saying "we have 100% market share because the market is our customers and only them."

In part you didn't comprehend what I wrote, and in part you are just plain wrong. The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers. It;s not the number sold by a singe developer, nor is it the number of devices sold.

I'll give you a hint as to why. It isn't because Apple sells phones, it has more to do with the itunes store and the marketing they do for you.

I don't need a hint. I'm an iPhone developer. I know full well the reasons for the success of iPhone Apps and the relative failure of Android apps. Yes, a major part of it is how easy Apple makes it for users to find, buy and install apps from their App Store. But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps. Many of those Android sales are cheap or free generic phones bought by people who just want a phone.

Now that you know I'm not partial to either company, why should Apple be able to block Adobe's media platform out of their hardware?

Why should Adobe be able to force Apple to offer certain apps on Apple's provided App store service?

Isn't this just like Microsoft bundling IE with Windows, leaving other browsers at a huge disadvantage?

No. Tying is only illegal and only undermines the free market when one of the markets being bundled has overwhelming influence in that market; otherwise competition works just fine to solve the problem (if it is one for consumers).

Isn't this worse because Adobe isn't even getting a chance to gain iPad customers?

No, because Adobe is not guaranteed the right to access any particular set of customers of any other device. Adobe doesn't get the chance to target GE Microwave users either. Apple doesn't get the chance to target Adobe Framemaker customers because Adobe doesn't offer a Mac version anymore. Neither company has a right to force the other to conform in a way to get access to those customers. Adobe can write apps for the iPhone just like anyone else, They can write App tools to make HTML5 apps just like anyone else. They have no legal or ethical right to anything more on Apple's service offering.

This is also companies deciding how their customers use their product, and that is bad.

Nope. Apple users can use their phones however they want. They don't even have to use Apple's app store. They can jailbreak it or install a different OS on their phone if they want. If they choose to use Apple's service, then they can.

It may not be illegal, but it is very bad and I really wish this community would get past their fanboi-ism and on to the actual topic.

I don't care for my phone to be as locked down as the iPhone and I'm enough of a security geek to be confident I can secure a different phone and vet apps properly. So I probably won't buy an iPhone because I don't care for it. That doesn't mean I think we should toss the laws out the window and let Adobe force Apple to conform to their desires in Apple's own offerings. If you don't like it, but an Android already. There's no monopoly on smartphones forcing you to buy an iPhone. How is that "fanboi-ism"?

If Apple gets away with this then they will set a sort of precedence.

I think the precedent is well established. Playstation, Atari, Steam, Barnes and Noble... pretty much any store whether a brick and mortar operation or online service can decide to stock whatever products they feel like and are not forced to carry others. Devices can be set up to work with a store, like XBox live. The iPhone App store is no different from a legal or ethical perspective.

It could start a trend where any hardware company could block a software company from their product, or the other way around, or with any combination of industries/products.

Well, technically it has to be a hardware/software/service company, since they have to offer all three vertically integrated in order to do this, but yeah, when a company offers all three they sure can lock out anyone they want... unless the customer replaces those locked in components (which the provider cannot stop for the most part).

Capitalism is great and all *cough* but the quest for a higher bottom line seems to remove all morals and justice from business and Apple's behavior represents just one of many slippery slopes.

Capitalism is great in that it takes the existing lack of morals, self interest, and greed and channels that into a mechanism that results in more innovation and lower prices for people. If you don't like the iPhone offering, nothing is stopping you from buying a different phone and using a more open app store. Write to Apple and tell them why you made the choice, and maybe they will decide the business case favors a more open approach. P.S. The "slippery slope" is the name of a common logical fallacy. As such it makes for a less convincing argument than you might think.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they (Apple) are already doing exactly that -- either building all-new apps from scratch, or revamping the OSS you mentioned. After all, you can just look at iWork versus Microsoft Office to see that they've got the stones to take on the entrenched giants.

I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps.

Shades of MacOS 8. It's a good thing they're protecting you.

In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.

No, I think it's where you have a general purpose computing device that you're happy to have locked in simple-mode.

I'd be happy my phone ship in simple-mode, where I couldn't accidentally leave a torrent program running and draining the battery/bandwidth, but I can't imagine why I'd be happy to have a device that could do what I wanted and just wouldn't.

Isn't it $99 once a year, every year? And don't they force sale of an Intel Mac on each developer as well? (I haven't looked around to see if the suite runs on a hackintosh. It's kind of a scary thing to wonder about in public. The long knives of the mac zealots would probably come out quickly.)